Reading can do more than serve as a stimulus for writing. Joyce and Christie
(1989) emphasize that it also plays an important role in acquiring students with the
rules and characteristics of skilled writing. Reading can "expose students to models of
different types of writing" (Joyce & Christie, 1989, p.105), e.g. literature, expository
or other modes of texts. Eckhoff (1984) analyzed the writing of 2-graders who had
been trained to read two different basal readers series: one read books with simple
structures and the other with more complex style. She found that the learners' writing
transferred certain characteristics of passages they had been reading. In her study,
learners who read stories with more complex sentence patterns used more complex
syntax in their writing, while the other learners wrote with simpler structure after
reading the stories with simpler patterns. Butler and Turbill (1984) also showed that
the 8-year-old boy's nonfiction writing resembled the narrative stories to which he had
wider exposure.